JACK'S BLOG
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BloggingBLOGGERS ARE TRUSTING SOULS. We'll open the door to anyone. No charge. Come on in. We bare our souls and wait for the comments. More often than not, there aren't any. Visitors lurk in the shadows and we're left to wonder. Who's there? What are they thinking? Do they agree? Disagree? Maybe we scare them off with our perfect spelling and punctuation. They don't have my wife looking out for them. You don't need to know Internet technology to be a successful blogger. You don't need to know the difference between a modem and a router. You don't need to know that requests and responses are transmitted in packets. All you really need to know is that clients (the computers that people use to read your blog) send requests, and web servers (computers that host your website) return responses. This knowledge will help you understand how to read logs so that you can tell the difference between what drives traffic to your website/weblog and what doesn't. Obviously you want to do more of that which works, and stop wasting your time and money on that which doesn't.
I watch my website/weblog traffic using the logs provided by my web hosting service, and Google Analytics. I see that nearly 30,000 people visit every month. They wander from page to page. Every hit – that's a request from a client (computer workstation) for a web page – is recorded. Every visit – that's one or more hits from the same client – is recorded. Who referred them – that's the website that provided the link to my website – is recorded. Or, did they request a page from my website – a direct request – by typing its URL into their web browser or clicking on a bookmark that they saved during a previous visit. How does the web server know all this? Well, every request that it receives comes with a header that includes the identity of the client that requested it. How else is the web server going to know where to send the page that's been requested? No, that's not your name; it's the unique IP (Internet Protocol) Address of the computer where the request originated. Thus, if two or more people visit my website from the same computer, the web server will count them as two visits from the same visitor. If you visit my website from two different computers, the web server will count them as visits from two different visitors. Just as every client has a unique IP Address, every website has a unique IP Address. How else would your client know where to send the request? (Yes, that means there are a lot of unique addresses on the Internet. Each one consists of four sets of three numbers: e.g. 999.999.999.999. That's a pretty big number and yet, we're running out of them. The new Internet Protocol provides for even more.) If you click on a link to my website that you find in someone else's website, the IP Address of that web site is included in the request header. That is how my web server knows who referred you to my website. Not all requests are for webpages. One of my favorites is any request for a feed from my website. Currently, my web server receives about 100 requests for feeds every day, and responds with an XML document containing all postings in my blog. (Don't go! I'll explain it.) Webpages are HTML documents – a document written in the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) describing all the words and images on a webpage. Your client browser (Microsoft Internet Explorer, Fire Fox, Google Chrome, etc.) reads this document and “renders” my webpage on your screen. An Extended Mark Up Language (XML) document contains data as well as a template describing how the data is organized (structured). A special app in your computer can be configured to show you just the new postings or maybe, the four or five most recent ones. Some apps provide just a few lines as a summary, and a link to the blog so you can read more if you want. These readers are often referred to as news feeds. Thus, requests for feeds indicate that someone is looking at my blog regularly. I include feeds from other blogs on my website to help promote other bloggers who I feel have something worth reading. You can see them at Blogs to Follow on my website. Okay, take a deep breath. Yes, I trapped you into reading a lot of geeky computer terminology. Forgive me. You need to know it if you're ever going to make sense of the reports that come out of your web server and services such as Google Analytics. I'm going to introduce you to Google Analytics next week. If you don't already know about it, Google Analytics is a free service that samples the traffic at your website and provides simplified reports. including graphs and maps, to help you make sense of it. Until then, check out your website hosting service and, if you haven't already, begin studying the reports they provide. If they don't provide logs or analytics for your website, it might be a good idea to switch to another hosting service. You cannot manage your website/weblog effectively without them. You're flying blind without any feedback to help you understand what you're doing and how you might become more successful at it.
6 Comments
9/9/2012 07:46:33 pm
I don't do all that geeky stuff Jack but I keep getting reports from Google Analytics on my mobile that never seem to open! Thanks for the nudge in this direction!
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9/10/2012 01:57:20 am
We religiously check our analytics daily and weekly and monthly. I don't know how it's done out there in cyberspace but it keeps us on track, and that's all I can ask.
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9/12/2012 06:00:23 am
Big Brother is watching us! Thanks Jack for all this illuminating explanation but it certainly has strengthened my conviction that Big Brother is indeed watching us! So we all have our identification tag in the system, wow! I do hope no digital theocracy ever takes over - and imagine if it were Al Qaeda!!
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9/12/2012 06:28:03 am
The Internet could not exist without IP addresses. Without a unique identifier for every computer, it would be impossible for them to exchange data. Imagine a postal system in which no one had an address. Okay, I know that worked once upon a time. You could mail a letter to a person indicating nothing more than their name and the general area in which they lived, and the "addressee" might receive it. There weren't many people in those days. Nor were there many letters being sent, since most people were illiterate. But, how could you request a webpage without knowing the identity of the computer where it was stored? How could the webpage be returned to you if the server had no identity for the computer that requested it?
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9/13/2012 07:31:13 am
Very interesting stuff! I have the free wordpress statistics, so I don't get so see as much as you do. It's interesting to hear how it all works though.
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9/13/2012 07:35:02 am
Make sure you check back this coming Monday. I am going to start discussing Google Analytics. I don't know if they work with WordPress, but it's something to check out.
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